The bird

[Robin Hamilton]

Apropos of nothing, my Dear Dead Dad once told me a story of giving someone
the finger late forties.

Turned on an essay he wrote as a high school student.

Mind you, I am mildly skeptical of Stories My Father Told Me -- like, can
you believe an aspirant Church of Scotland Minister who apparently impressed
his wife-to-be by tipping three other aspirant Church of Scotland ministers
out of a row-boat in the middle of the Clyde?

Contrawise, I actually probably could document the moment Jack Glass stood
up in the middle of one of my father's sermons and brandished a poster
reading, "Go back to Rome, Hamilton!"

My father, much as I hate to admit this, kinda wasn't exactly the brightest
bulb in the drawer, and the subtext of Jack Glass's protest could have been
either that Dear Dead Dad espoused the Pelagian Heresy, or that he chummed
with Jesuits.

Father, broadminded as he was, was a bit wary of Jesuits.  The only time he
ever let me talk to one of his Jesuit pals was when I was trying to track
down the origins of "Nihil in sensu", and the end result of *that was that I
decided that that the reputation Jesuits had for Extreme Latin Knowledge was
over-rated.  (Yeah I *know this tracks back to Aristotle via Aquinas, so
tell me something new.)

Dear Dead Dad always sat at at the Celtic end of the pitch at the Old Firm
Games ...

The only annecdote I have of my father getting totally pissed out of his
skull also turns on his identity as a Church of Scotland Misister,

This segue is dedicated to Wilson Gray, who always datestamps his comments
on AAVE, and has to be the world's expert on teaching-by-showing.

Robin

(Oh yeah, Dear Dead Dad once pissed off my mother by publishing a letter in
the local newspaper reading, "My labrador votes liberal.")

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